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Close-Up Film Centre

97 Sclater Street
E1 6HR London

A Programme of Jean-Marie Straub's recent video works.

In Un Conte de Michel de Montaigne (A Tale by Michel de Montaigne) the philosopher recounts an incident that happened to himself, and succeeds in showing us how an experience that is painful or threatening can be transfigured and the danger that lies in salvation.

L'Aquarium et la Nation (The Aquarium and the Nation) is a reflection on history, the passage of time and the fate of man. As in previous films of Jean-Marie Straub, it assembles disparate texts and elements in a meaningful whole: a shot of a fish aquarium, the orchestral version of Joseph Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, a reading by psychoanalyst and film writer and sound editor Aimé Agnel of an excerpt of André Malraux's last novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg (1948) and a sequence taken from Jean Renoir's 1938 film La Marseillaise.

With Où en êtes-vous, Jean-Marie Straub? (Where Are You, Jean-Marie Straub?), the director offers a short and personal response to a commission of the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the occasion of the 2016 retrospective dedicated to himself and Danièle Huillet.

Un Conte de Michel de Montaigne, A Tale by Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Marie Straub, France/Switzerland, 2013, HD/DCP, colour, 34 min., in French with English subtitles.